Taliban flogging, women’s rights are human rights

Hillary Clinton said that. Women’s rights are human rights.

People are outraged by the recent flogging video, but my question is, what exactly did you think was going on in places like that? Under extremist Islamic rule, that is not new. Out of sight, out of mind, yeah?

Will this new outrage herald a positive change?

I doubt it. Prove me wrong, please prove me wrong.

All this sh*t has been going on for years, people like the UN rebuking, countries expressing their disapproval, ordinary people holding protests – and yet, here we still are, the cycle keeps on spinning.

I was a human rights researcher, once upon a time, and I’ve got to tell ya, nothing makes you hate people more than working in a field like human rights. People can be, and often are, nasty pieces of work.

Enough about me, again, have some news –

New Delhi (IANS): After video clips of a 17-year-old girl being flogged in public by Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s Swat valley were shown on TV, India’s Islamic scholars denounced it as “un-Islamic” and “satanic” and condemned it as “gross violation” of Quranic codes.

Renowned Islamic scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan spoke out strongly against the incident and added that if anything, the act was absolutely “un-Islamic – even satanic”.

“This kind of treatment is neither Islamic nor human. In fact, not only is it un-Islamic and inhuman, but also satanic,” Khan, who has authored over 200 books on Islam, told IANS.

Salima Khan, a student doing her PhD in Delhi University, said that she literally boiled in anger after seeing the video clip on YouTube, the popular video sharing website and then again on TV.

“Such acts just show how Islam has been grossly misinterpreted by a handful of people who are using it as a tool to serve their own cause,” Salima said angrily.

India has an estimated 140 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan.